Creating a Fabric Covered Journal

There is nothing nicer than a beautiful journal or diary to write your thoughts in. Creating a fabric covered journal or diary is not as hard as you may think. Follow these step by step instructions and create a beautiful journal of your own or make a gift for a friend. These make great teacher gifts too.

Steps to Covering

Buy materials from a large home craft store and a superstore like K Mart. I chose a page-a-day diary but you could use a notebook or address book instead.

Select a small square (a fat quarter) of 100% cotton fabric in a pattern you like. There are so many quilting fabrics that are great for this project. To make it even more cost effective you could use fabric from a thrift store that you like.

Start by measuring the fabric and make sure there is about an inch of fabric right around the book.

Glue the one side of the diary with craft glue, using a paint brush.

Slowly cover the glued side with the fabric, making sure that it lies flat and smooth. Make sure there are no bumps or fabric irregularities.

Repeat the process with the spine and the other side of the diary. Don’t use too much glue – you want the cover to stick to the fabric, but you don’t want the glue soaking through the fabric.

Cut around the spine as you would if you were covering a hard book with paper. Fold over the edges and glue them down.

Paste the first and last pages of the diary over the cover to neaten it and keep the fabric stuck down.

Decorating

Now the embellishing and decorating starts! Glue some ribbon onto the diary and fold the edges over to the cover pages.

Glue a piece of card or scrap-booking paper over this to make it pretty and to cover the ribbon ends and hold it in place.

Lastly add some stickers or words to decorate the cover. Some other ideas would be to use letters or initials, buttons, craft embellishments like butterflies, flowers etc. There is so much you could do.

This is a very quick project – it took me no more than half an hour to create the covered book in the photographs and the result was lovely and very budget friendly. I reckon that buying this in the shop would be about $20. I made this diary for $6.50. Happy crafting everyone.